In addition to our dedicated servers, we also offer products on our cloud platform Storm on Demand. More information about the differences can be found here on our knowledge base in our Comparison article.

Working in a virtualized environment such as Storm on Demand does indeed give you a significant amount of control over your server, but you can now take that one step further: we have introduced an exciting new feature that allows you to create your very own Storm Cloud Parent.

You – and only you – will be allowed to add Storm instances to this private parent, and your parent will largely be separate from the public cloud. This allows you to have even more control over the environment! Your private Storm parent will be connected to the public network for certain features such as the Storm backup system and Server Images management. The physical parent machine will control networking for your servers, but will be connected to the public network to utilize the Storm infrastructure.

Please note that this means that your backups and server images will be stored in an environment that is shared with (but not accessible to) other users. Additionally, networking on the physical server is not shared, but the networking infrastructure between your private Storm Cloud parent and other Storm Cloud parents is considered a shared resource.

To get started, log into your Manage interface and press the “Create” button, like you normally would when creating a new server. You will see “Storm Private Cloud Parent” listed as one of the options. Select that box and then press yellow Configure New Device button to customize your parent.

Select the Parent you want to build, taking note of the number of processor cores, RAM and disk configuration. Due to the nature of this product, you will not be able to change these settings later, but you will be able to create a new Storm Private Cloud Parent and move your servers over. Once you have finalized your options, you will be asked to give your cloud a name. Note: This does not actually have to be a fully-qualified domain name (meaning you do not need to include a host. or www. prefix) as this is used internally to manage and will not resolve. Press the green “Create Server” button to build your Cloud Parent. You will be asked to confirm this, as your account will be charged upon completion.

You will now see your Storm Parent listed on your Server Overview. You can check the Dashboard and History through the interface like with any server you have created. In addition, you now also have the option to destroy the server.

Adding servers to your Parent is simple. Click create once again and select your server type. You will be able to add both Windows and Linux servers to your parent. For this exercise, we will add a Linux VPS first. After selecting the option and clicking “Create New Device,” you will be taken to the Deployment page. You will notice at the top of the page there is now a Deployment Options drop-down menu. The default on this menu is Public Storm but, by clicking on it, you may select your private Storm parent.

Once you have selected your Private Cloud Parent, the options for the server change. First of all, you will notice there is no longer a monthly charge for this server as you are paying the costs through your Cloud parent. You may now manipulate the sliders to select the desired resources. These options default to the minimum, but you will likely want to increase these to ensure the server has enough resources to handle the expected traffic. As with all Storm servers, you will have the option to re-size later. Press the “Create Server” button and then confirm this action to create your server.

If you choose to add one or more Windows servers, a monthly licensing fee that is based on the number of processor cores in the parent will be added. If you later remove all of these Windows servers, this additional fee will be removed. This is a fixed fee for licensing Windows to the parent and does not increase for adding more than one Windows server so you will not increase this fee by adding additional Windows servers after the first.

Please Note: The sliders scale up to the maximum resources available for the parent, so you will want to take into consideration how many servers you plan to create on the parent to avoid dedicating too many resources to one server at the cost of the rest. For each 4 servers you create on a parent, we recommend leaving 512 to 1024 MB of RAM unallocated to perform parent-level processes such as backups, server images, and firewalls. This will minimize the risk of the parent encountering a low memory situation and needing to utilize swap, which would cause significant performance degradation for all servers on the parent.

A good rule of thumb would be to add no more servers to a parent than it has processor cores. Running more servers the number of physical cores in the parent can cause a loss in CPU performance for all servers. The recommending maximum limit of servers for a parent would be double the parent’s physical CPU cores, beyond this point there is a significant loss of CPU performance.

Once your parent and servers are created, if backups are configured there is a 24-hour window for all of the backups of servers on the parent to run. Depending on the number of servers created on the parent, the disk activity in those servers and the disk subsystem on the parent, this may not be possible in all cases. Please bear this in mind and consider alternative backups.

That’s it! Now you have your own Storm Private Cloud Parent, complete with several servers. You have total control over this environment as well as all of the features you normally enjoy with Storm!